Derek Lowe's commentary on drug discovery and the pharma industry. An editorially independent blog from the publishers of Science Translational Medicine. All content is Derek’s own, and he does not in any way speak for his employer.

Posts tagged with "Analytical Chemistry"

Analytical Chemistry

When you get down to it, most of the ways that we chemists have to make our reactions work are not very elegant. We can change solvents, mess with ligands, drip A into B slowly instead of B into A, etc. But we’re still depending on the molecules involved just running into each other. We… Read More

Analytical Chemistry

How small-molecule drugs fit into binding pockets in their targets is one of the central questions of medicinal chemistry. A new paper from a group at Oxford gives a good example of how varied that process can be – it’s looking at a number of drugs that have been shown to interfere (to some degree) with… Read More

Analytical Chemistry

Here’s another one of those nanoscale articles that gives me a bit of a shiver, because it shows pictures of something that I had assumed was beyond our ability to see. The authors, from the Ruhr University in Bochum, are looking at a simple organic molecule (an azobenzene, shown at right), adsorbed onto a solid… Read More

Analytical Chemistry

Here’s a good short review on a subject that doesn’t come up too often in drug discovery, but can be a major headache when it does: atropisomerism. There are all sorts of structural isomers possible for organic compounds, and students in their second-year class have a joyful time learning them and keeping them straight. But… Read More

Analytical Chemistry

Ask a chemist (I’ll do) about optical rotation, and you’ll get a confident answer about how right- and left-handed isomers of chiral compounds will rotate polarized light that shines through a solution of one of them. Ask one of us exactly how it does that, and in 99 cases out of a hundred, you’ll witness… Read More

Analytical Chemistry

You might be surprised to know how little we chemists know about what our reactions are really doing. A case in point is the “on water” field. Water is generally not the greatest solvent for a lot of classic organic chemistry reactions, since the reactants, reagents, and products are often not very soluble (or are… Read More

Analytical Chemistry

The Chemistry Nobel committee seems to have taken everyone by surprise today with their award for cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM). That’s not because it isn’t Nobel-worthy, though – it certainly is. But they tend to take their time before recognizing discoveries (ask 95-year-old John Goodenough, a key inventor of the lithium ba… Read More

Analytical Chemistry

Blogging time is tight today, but there are several interesting stories and follow-ups that I wanted to mention. For starters, I wrote here about a cyclohexane analog that’s fluorinated all on one side of the molecule. That gives you very odd properties, and it and its relatives could be really useful solvents and additives, but… Read More

Analytical Chemistry

Chemists love crystals. We don’t do as much recrystallization as we used to, since there are higher-throughput (and less labor-intensive) ways of purifying things these days, but I don’t think I’ve ever met an organic chemist who isn’t happy when a product crystallized out nicely. And we all know what crystals are like ̵… Read More

Analytical Chemistry

I wrote some years ago about the case of a protein that seemed to have a completely empty binding pocket – empty, as in not even any water molecules hanging around in there. There are a number of these known, and there’s a lot of arguing about them among both experimental and computational chemists. You’d… Read More